


the Workings of a curious mind

by invisible_cities



Category: Coldfire Trilogy - C. S. Friedman
Genre: Gen, a mess of POVs, going gentle into the good night, implied future mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:07:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/invisible_cities/pseuds/invisible_cities
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ciani of Faraday, from an adorable (and bugged) three-year-old to standing in front of the Canopy, about to cross it for the first time. </p><p>We all know what comes after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the Workings of a curious mind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambyr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/gifts).



> Happy Yule and happy reading, dearest ambyr.
> 
> Hope this is at least close to what you were looking for. Headcannons ate my brain, like I was a little girl dreaming of monsters. The Killer (Plot)Rabbits of ~~Caerbannog~~... Jahanna? The Killer Nubbits of Jahanna?

1\. **Seeing**

Lord Roberto Edesta, father of four, was no Neocount, of course, but he was a Lord of considerable means (blessed be the laws of Faraday which allowed the nobles to participate in trade), deeply in love with his beautiful second wife, happy with his three healthy sons and ready to spoil his youngest child, his only daughter.

The world of aristocratic children – a group to which little Ciani Edesta belonged, along with her three older brothers – was a very colourful place.

Little Ciani, his lovely lady Cee, was three years old and such a curious thing – and she adored colours. Even if she sometimes saw them in very strange places. Or sometimes mislabeled them. Such a precious little girl could be forgiven, though, for sometimes pointing at trees outside their carriage windows and saying “Red. Pretty! Pretty!” in the middle of spring.

Besides, she had excellent instincts when it came to eavesdropping, Roberto thought to himself while affixing a dazzling brooch inlaid with semi-precious stones (and Worked to record and play back three hours of nearby conversations once activated) to her tiny, adorable dress. She would just head for the nearest group of adults talking in low voices and stand there, drinking them in, looking extra adorable if spotted. Such great instincts. Little Ciani was going to be such a wonderful lady.

While lady Cee examined the brooch with mild interest, her father murmured the Key to the Working affixed to the brooch (and prickled his finger a little on the pin in order to add a drop of blood to start the Working - an act of faith that actually made it effective even without a sorceror to activate it) and watched her eyes light right up.

“Oooh, blue! Shiny,” she crowed happily, zigzagging towards a group of indulgent adults who would soon forget she was even there.  
Strange, Roberto thought. The brooch was set with pink quartz and citrine, so what…?

 

(Lord Edesta’s first wife passed away in childbirth, but not before she managed to give him a healthy heir – and a sizeable dowry, which he used as the seed money to start his trading company and restore his family to a good standing, as opposed to just good breeding. Really, she had been a wonderful woman.)

 

2\. **Obscuring**

When lady Cee did not want to be found, she wasn’t. That easy.

Well, no, not quite. She knew her home very well, she could fit into cupboards. She could also fit under bushes, and behind the compost heap far into the garden of their townhouse, and possibly once in a valise. The servant who opened that one got quite a scare, and he got a bit angry, but lady Cee was four and adorable and wearing a ruffled pink dress and she had – so her Daddy kept telling her – Very Good Instincts.

Her father was right, she did have an exceptional for her age grasp of how people would react, if she just… did… this. “This” consisted of a quivering bottom lip, a few tears, and saying in a small voice that, “it was so dark inside, I was so scared, please Mister” and a lot more tears.

She could not know, young a she was, why the servant went white under his tan – that the valise was very well made, that it was indeed very dark inside, that exposing such a young child to a place the sun couldn’t reach, even for such a short while… 

He resolved to watch her carefully, make sure she was not harmed or (he shuddered) changed. 

He didn’t – lady Cee, after having a good cry (she had been a little scared, and the servant was there and convenient to hug), left the room and gave the situation serious, four-year-old thought. She remembered seeing, just after he opened the valise, how the servant’s eyes slipped right over her – and then came back to her, scared and surprised.

So maybe…

 

A few weeks later, Ciani – now nearing her fifth birthday – added the horse stalls to her list of hiding places. If she remembered how she felt in the valise, and didn’t want anybody to notice her, she could tiptoe very softly past the horses and hide inside.

She just had to wish really, really hard not to be found when the stable boys came to muck out the stalls. She wasn’t so good at people, yet. One of them, Zen? Yes, Zen, he kept finding her no matter how good she hid.

3\. **Sending**

Stuck. She was stuck.

Lady Cee tried the cupboard doors again. Still stuck. With her inside. She was sure it had been days. She was so hungry. And so bored!

Wait, it couldn’t have been days, because she could see the dust motes. But she was so bored! And this cupboard only had dishtowels and Cee inside, no food.

“Help! Let me out let me out letmeoutlemmeout!” she yelled. Nobody in the kitchens heard her over the din of preparing dinner.

 

When they were packing her off to be examined by a potential her new teacher –an adept! He could see shiny things too! – the youngest of the stable boys, Senzei Reese, went with her. Zen had been the one to run, panicked, out of the stables and into the house, into the kitchen. Then he had to beg Cook to open the cupboard. (He had tried to open it himself, first, but the doors really were stuck.)

He had to explain, then, that lady Cee was inside and that she wanted to be let out. He must have looked frantic enough that Cook, though skeptical, decided to indulge him and wrenched the cupboard doors open, only to find his employer’s daughter curled up on the dishtowels, fast asleep and looking staggeringly small.

They figured he probably had some talent, too, if he could be so scared for a brat yelling in a shut cupboard in another building. He didn’t tell them (all of nine and already a smart young man) that he mostly didn’t like the brat all that much and he’d wanted her to shut up.

 

4\. **Knowing**

Zen did have some talent, after all. He did, he would make a very good sorceror someday, their Master said, but it was lady Cee who was all special. Because she was an adept, she could See, and she would need no Keys to the easy Workings when she was all grown up.

But she was tiny now, all of almost six, right? And she had no control. And when the Master made Zen and lady Cee do their first Knowing (about humans as a speh-shes), after teachin’ Zen to See so he could look what their Master made fae do, Zen did so good, he got all the information Master wanted, jus’ about, and lady Cee jus’… tried a moment and screamed a lil’ and started cryin’, yeah?

So Zen was maybe a little bit jealous, about the Vision and all, but bygods, he was all studyin’ to be a sorceror too, all paid for, and she was jus’ a kid. Of the people who paid for him to study, too. So maybe he could be a little nice. 

 

5\. **Cursing (and Divining)**

The first conscious Knowing that Cee worked – well, it wouldn’t have been so bad, had she not been an adept. She took too much fae, yes, tugged at the currents too strongly, and this much knowledge would have hurt her brain a little even if she couldn’t process it all. Of course she couldn’t have processed it all, she was six.

The problem was, she was also an adept. This meant she always Saw, and that Knowing… Overlaid with her Vision, she saw the years happening to her Master, to Zen – all that age could bring, all the ways their bodies could fail (or succeed), all the little things adding up to their hearts stopping to pump blood and their lungs no longer moving and their eyes closed, cloded, closed, mouths open and empty of breath and teeth, and she just screamed. Just a little. Then she started crying.

She clung to Zen, face in his shirt, and thought that he liked her better than her brothers, and that he would die, and then she would… She would…

 

It took time for them to realize what Ciani must have done, that day. When her eldest brother was forty three (and Ciani and Senzei were running a well-established _Fae Shoppe_ in Jaggonath, open at all hours), his first grandchild was born. A healthy, strong grandson, to continue the line.

At the time Senzei looked, and physically felt, about twenty five. Ciani could pass for twenty.

 

6\. **Summoning**

Ciani had many reasons to choose, of all the things an adept could be, becoming a loremaster as a profession. She could have concentrated on wardmaking, on making Worked objects, perhaps weapons if she wanted large profits and fast, or on Divining for courts. She could have become a cherished priestess (probably a high priestess in less than five years, if she applied her talents with determination to this goal) of any of the ninety-six pagan churches in Jaggonath. She wanted to do everything, know _everything_.

And she wanted to keep an eye on Zen. Maybe keep him on as an apprentice, formally; she’d kept learning much faster than he had, so that could work, and anyway she still wasn’t quite sure how to undo whatever she must have done as a child – he wasn’t aging quite properly for a sorceror of his caliber. Of course, if Zen were ever to ask her to take it back, she would probably devote more attention to fixing it; for now, he seemed content.

Ciani herself was aging as any strong adept would, which meant, after she hit twenty, almost invisibly. 

She took a loremaster’s vows 

_to obtain knowledge firsthand, to gather and barter it, to learn from all who had something to teach and to sell that knowledge, if she so chose, to anyone at all_

and settled down to making Worked objects, setting up (and sometimes embroidering) wards, to knowing everything she possibly could. She had chosen Jaggonath for its location – trade routes, fast but not too fast manifestial response, a lot of cults – and her newly opened _Fae Shoppe_ did brisk business.

With some of her first earnings, she purchased a lovely gown, a fantastic feast (all real and fresh, for nothing less would do as a… not an offering, an incentive) and summoned Karril. Time to do some serious research.

 

7\. **Healing**

When her first Master finally caught her Working a half-instinctive, utterly off-the-training-schedule Obscuring, she was seven. Considering the fact that her parents had realized her talents (if not the extent of them) and had equally promptly found her an adept to teach her when she was five, well, Ciani counted keeping this ability to pass unnoticed, almost unremembered, a secret for two years a success.

He might have taken so long to notice because he was a weaker adept than her, which Ciani knew even at seven – he saw less, unless he made an effort to See, and to a little girl, that was an important benchmark.

He tanned her hide for it, of course. Then he applied herbal poultices – to keep infection from setting in, to numb some of the pain – to her back and let her heal naturally, bruises slowly turning even brighter colours and the cuts from the belt scabbing over. 

She couldn’t see the shifts of natural fae as the skin of her back knit back together and the bruises faded, but it made strange noises, just beyond the edges of her hearing: the mending skin sort of crackled as it bridged together, and the swelling went “shush, shush” as it went down. The bruises… they were silent, but the other sounds just wouldn’t. Let. Her. Fall. Asleep.

Faced with a sleep-deprived, cranky, brilliant seven-year-old apprentice and who could potentially Send for her aristocratic parents, her Master caved and healed her the rest of the way. It looked pretty, what little of the process she could see.

 

(Almost sixty years later, when a curious clergyman – during one of their frank exchanges of information – asks her why she does not advertise an ability in Healing among her many, many marketable skills, she replies easily, “I prefer not to do the damage in the first place.”

Damien probably thinks it has to do with being a loremaster.

It does.)

 

8\. **Remembering**

From time to time, Ciani would leave the shop in Zen’s capable hands and just… take a break. Sometimes this involved travel outside of the city, to obtain an esoteric Worked item or an interesting document. Sometimes it was a meeting with a potentially useful (or already established) contact. 

Sometimes, and this was one of the few truly unique things her old Master had taught her, as far as she knew – sometimes, she would take the time off to reflect and reconsider different aspects of her art. Doing so would require a combination of Knowings, Rememberings and Divinations, the right phases of the moons and the Core, and the proximity of true night, even though she didn’t use dark fae herself. 

This time, the subject of reflection was personal need and the way it influenced the way she shaped the fae; need, as contrasted with conscious efforts and subconscious fears. The first Remembering brought with it the memories of the valise, the first, half-conscious Obscurings she’d done (nothing to cloud a loremaster’s eyes, but impressive and strange in a child of four or five who’s had no instruction). The second brought the exact circumstances of her first Sending, the third – of her first Knowing, of that deep, almost-panicky _need_ to keep Zen with her – Zen, who’d been the only familiar thing in that strange new place.

There were other things she recalled, facts about native Ernan species and rumours of just what could be found under the Canopy. If the rakh had truly learned how to harness the fae consciously, but on the basis of need and not willpower …

She needed to know. She _needed_.

 

Two and a half months later, after a very smooth journey, she was standing on the deck of a smuggling vessel about to cross the Canopy. Zen could mind the shop for a while.


End file.
